They have been bought, and now are members of the plutocracy’s lobby. So, they can’t lobby for the national small business owners, because it would be an attack on the folks who pay the bills. They really are a wing of the Republican Party, and the locals are conservative, but not necessarily Republican.

- our labour representatives are fighting hard and still successfully to limit surveillance by employers – whenever something like recently with our discounter Lidl gets media attention, the public outcry is huge, sales suffer, they have to make amends and they have to be much more careful next time around not to stretch the boundaries of the permitted (Lidl had the tough luck and “we” had the good luck that one or several of the cameras installed gave a bit of a view of customers punching in their PINs – Lidl ran for weeks and weeks after that all kinds of charity actions and promised to be good without end i.e. as the public cares it is worthwhile for the media to go after them)

- but I get told that as far as surveillance is concerned we take it more seriously than other countries and I am all for taking it as seriously as possible (on the other hand we supervise eachother closely on whether we separate our garbage correctly and would probably love to have cameras there so the evildoers could be identified ;-)

??????
This seems backwards to me. It is the other way ’round, and WITHOUT the speculative IB side of Wall Street.

We need — among many others — stable, utility (retail: deposit saving and prudent loaning) banks to get a sustainable economy.

Simon Johnson and others have argumented that there was a small window of opportunity for change: jan – april ’09. The window has closed.

“My guess is Pres. Obama would tackle that issue in his 2nd term if re-elected.”

????????
Wait a minute: here we have a President, with his party a majority in congress (till the mid-term election next year), who has campaigned on a platform of change. Remember the joyful parties of people celebrating after election night: it really felt like impeachment by the people of the former administration. And now, clearly, we have ZERO CHANGE vis-a-vis Wall Street banksters!
If you guess Obama will be re-elected, to make good on his promise of the last election, then my guess is, your guess is wrong. Obama is heading for a 1 term presidency, like Bush Sr.

I always felt guilty about Will Durant. I got The Story of Civilization free for signing up with Book of the Month Club, but then cancelled the membership. The things that stuck with me all these years was a) how much he liked and cared about people b) how he and Ariel seemed to be one person:

“The Durants also shared a love story as remarkable as their scholarship; they detail this in Dual Autobiography. After Will went into the hospital, Ariel stopped eating. Will died after he heard that Ariel had died. They died within two weeks of each other in 1981 (she on October 25 and he on November 7). Though their daughter, Ethel, and grandchildren strove to keep the death of his Ariel from the ailing Will, he learned of it on the evening news, and he himself died at the age of 96. He was buried beside his wife in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Durant

“Throw the bums out” expresses the sentiment well, except that the bums are people too, so I’d translate it more “throw them all out.” Perhaps James and other legal scholars can guide us on how to do this. The constitution seems to require a little makeover.

I don’t know how pervasive cams and recording is in the states in office environments. The whole office-cam-broadcast-to-the-internet phenom seems to have died off, but on the other hand retail store owners, equipped with inexpensive surveillance, are now able to watch their employees 24/7 from anywhere in the world. Cameras are always running, focused on tills, in many businesses, so it looks like we have been living with the general concept fairly well, for a while now. From what I’ve seen, though, it’s just video, no audio, which is what such a venture would require.